The 11th Nitrate Picture Show

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Join us at the George Eastman Museum for the 11th Nitrate Picture Show, a festival of film conservation celebrating the unique experience
of watching original nitrate prints projected in the cinema.

Member Presale: Monday, December 7, 2026 at 12 p.m.
General Public On Sale: Tuesday, December 8, 2026, at 12 p.m.

Please contact nitrate@eastman.org with any festival-related questions.
 

2027 Passes and Reserved Seating

Pre-Register For Nitrate Picture Show on Eventive!
Set up your transaction details ahead of time to create a smooth sales experience

New for 2027, all Nitrate Picture Show passes include a reserved seat for the entire festival. When purchasing a pass, you will select an available seat in the Dryden Theatre. That seat will be assigned to you for all festival screenings.

Pass prices are based on the location of your selected seat.

Passes include admission to all Nitrate Picture Show screenings and programs throughout the festival. There is a limit of four passes per purchaser.

Patron Passes

Patron Passes offer an opportunity to provide additional support to the Nitrate Picture Show. Patron Pass holders receive the same festival admission and reserved seating as other pass holders, along with recognition on festival signage and in the festival catalog and a special gift of appreciation.

Student Passes

Current students may purchase a Student Pass at the discounted prices listed above. A valid, current student ID must be presented at festival registration. Attendees who purchase a Student Pass but cannot provide a valid student ID will be required to pay an additional $50 at the box office to retain their pass or receive a refund.

Member Presale

Active George Eastman Museum members will have access to a members-only presale beginning Monday, December 7, 2026, one week before passes go on sale to the general public.

Museum membership does not provide an additional discount on Nitrate Picture Show passes.

Visit our Membership page to become a George Eastman Museum member and to sign up for access to the Nitrate Picture Show members-only presale. Presale participants will receive information about accessing the sale by email.

The general public sale begins Tuesday, December 8, 2026, at 12 p.m.

How to Purchase

Passes will be sold online through Eventive. 

Pre-register now: We strongly recommend setting up your Eventive account before the sale begins to ensure that you are ready to purchase when passes go on sale. Click here to pre-register for Eventive. If you already have an Eventive account, you can use the same link to log in and confirm your account information so you are ready on the day you buy your pass. 

During your purchase, you will select your pass type and choose an available seat from the Dryden Theatre seating map. Your selected seat will remain your reserved seat for the entire festival.

Each pass is assigned to a specific attendee and will display that attendee’s reserved seat number.

Refunds, Transfers, and Waitlist

Pass refunds will be available through Friday, May 21, 2027.

If passes sell out, a waitlist will be available for those who would still like to attend the festival.

Because passes are assigned to individual attendees, passes may not be transferred or resold independently. Any pass transfer must be arranged through the George Eastman Museum box office.

There are no authorized third-party sellers for the Nitrate Picture Show.

Your Reserved Seat During the Festival

Your assigned seat will be held for you until ten minutes after the scheduled start of each screening.

After that time, unoccupied seats may be released to attendees waiting for single tickets on a rush-line basis. Pass holders arriving more than ten minutes after a screening begins will still receive admission at no additional charge, but their assigned seat will no longer be guaranteed. Ushers will seat late-arriving pass holders in another available seat.

We recommend arriving before the scheduled showtime to ensure access to your reserved seat.

Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center Nitrate Vault Tours

At the 11th Nitrate Picture Show, we are excited to once again offer a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, the George Eastman Museum’s nitrate film storage facility.

Tours will be offered on Thursday, June 3, 2027, with buses departing the museum at:

• 9 a.m.
• 11:15 a.m.
• 1:30 p.m.
• 3:45 p.m.

Attendance is open only to Nitrate Picture Show pass holders who reserve a spot. Tickets are $35 per person, and capacity is limited to fifteen guests per tour. Transportation between the museum and the Conservation Center will be provided by tour bus.

Located off-site in North Chili, New York, this state-of-the-art facility houses more than twelve million feet of highly flammable nitrate film, meticulously preserved under strict temperature and humidity controls to maintain the beauty and clarity of this remarkable medium. Led by our knowledgeable Collection Manager Deborah Stoiber, tour guests will gain insight into the history and care involved in preserving nitrate film, including the unique challenges that come with such volatile yet visually captivating material. Guests have the opportunity to learn about the intricate work required to protect cinematic history, from handling protocols to the technical requirements for storage.

About the Nitrate Picture Show

The Nitrate Picture Show features screenings of vintage nitrate prints from international archives and the Eastman Museum’s own collection and lectures from leading archivists, inviting you to experience the art and science of film preservation, from print conservation to archival projection. Film fans who have attended our festival before will tell you that it's the rare experience of watching original nitrate prints projected in the cinema while surrounded by other enthusiasts that really makes the Nitrate Picture Show unique.

Since the very first edition, which took place in 2015, the titles of the films have only been announced on the first day of the festival, and the last screening has traditionally been a Blind Date with Nitrate, where the title is revealed when the curtain rises and the light from the projector hits the screen. Hence, we cannot say anything about the program selected for 2027. Instead, we can name a few titles we screened in the past. These include tinted silent prints of Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith) and Die freudlose Gasse [The Joyless Street] (1925, Georg Wilhelm Pabst); original release prints of Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930, Josef von Sternberg), L’age d’or [The Golden Age] (1930, Luis Bunuel), Liebelei (1933, Max Ophüls), Stella Dallas (1937, King Vidor), Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939, Marcel Carné), Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincent Minnelli), Leave Her to Heaven (1945, John M. Stahl), Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding), Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948, Vittorio de Sica), The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed), and Bakushu [Early Spring] (1951, Yasujiro Ozu); William Wyler’s personal prints of Counsellor at Law (1933) and The Good Fairy (1935) and David O. Selznick’s prints of A Star is Born (1937) and Rebecca (1940); a stunning 1945 British release print of The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming); one of the few surviving nitrate prints of Alexander Nevsky (1938, Sergei Eisenstein) and Vredens dag [Day of Wrath] (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer). Among other filmmakers whose works were screened at the first seven festivals are René Clair, George Cukor, Robert J. Flaherty, John Ford, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Ernst Lubitsch, Mikio Naruse, Roberto Rossellini, Douglas Sirk, Preston Sturges, Teuvo Tulio, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh, among others. We were lucky to find multiple projectable titles by Alfred Hitchcock and the legendary duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In the Nitrate Shorts section, we presented Walt Disney’s first color films, screen tests for Gone with the Wind (1939), as well as experimental works by Mary Ellen Bute, Oscar Fischinger, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. We set a high standard, and we are planning to live up to it.